#UWinDig

For the third multimedia assignment I decided to try my hand at a completely new tool, Explain Everything. It is ultimately a smart board on the iPad (there is also a desktop version) that lets you insert images, videos, browser files and annotate/record your voice over them. You can then go back and edit, cut and change each component. I will say it was a much bigger taking on than I had imagined, and I don’t know if I was able to even show even close to what this is capable of. I would one day like to become very proficient in this technology as I feel it would be a very handy tool in a one iPad class to get concepts that were prepared in a creative way previously. Another great feature of this app is that you can invite individuals to view and collaborate on your whiteboard with you, which would be great in a classroom setting. It would also be very beneficial as a tutorial or guidance type system as you can open and control a browser, so it lends itself nicely to this assignment.

I could not figure out how to store pre-loaded tabs, so I was not able to show many of the hyperlinks within the resource to their full potential. However, the biggest issue I faced was timing my commentary to the doodles I made, as I tried to do them separately. I filmed and recorded numerous times until I reached a video I was semi pleased with. If I had had more time, as I mentioned above, I would have loved to test out some of the other features but I would have needed weeks of time to set aside (here’s looking at you summer). I also realized after the fact that there was a desktop version I could have been using which may have made to process a little less tedious, however my iPad was sill sufficient. This app is a freemium model which limits the amount of projects you can have and their lengths. I paid for 1 month just to see what would unlock and I am very please so far. I can’t wait to try and incorporate it into my own lessons, which transitions nicely into the next topic…

The focus of this multimedia assignment was on ecampus Ontario’s Technologist Module. It is an open education platform with the primary goal of raising digital literacy awareness and providing educators with the steps they need to consider before integrating technology to support a need within their class. This is one of the six modules offered on the extend page.

Users are immediately greeted by a short video about Terry  a teacher who wants to do better by his students and start utilizing technology. I found the layout of the site to be clean and intuitive. It was clear that there were steps and one was to work through them page by page until complete.  However, the amount of information covered under each tab was extremely overwhelming, not to mention the amount of clickable content dotted within the bulk text. As someone who struggles to sit down and read for long periods of time, this would have been a deterrent for me. However, for some, this is preferable. Although they did try to incorporate some videos at the start they disappeared by the third or fourth tab which meant there was no option but to read in the latter half of the module.

One facet of this outline I thought really positive was the community interaction through the Activity Bank response options. This was in attempt to get the users of the module to collaborate and share their thoughts and opinions. However, when I clicked to join in there was only ever a handful of users who actually used this feature which is very unfortunate. If there was more of a push to join the pool of collaborators I feel this would greatly benefit the overall engagement of the module.  Another aspect which was executed beautifully is the amount of templates and exemplars users have at their fingertips – very handy resources for future consideration. They even have The Great Tool List of technologies available to teachers, some of which I had not heard of!

As for the content, it is very valuable and educational albeit overwhelming at times. The program talks about technology integration as being student-centred and about meeting learners where they are. It then walks you through the Design Thinking model as a means of achieving integration for differentiated instruction – meeting your students where they are asking to be met. As part of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) model, it is an educators job to assume there is a variety of learners in their classroom and the Design Thinking model reflects this practice. Beginning with empathy, trying to understand the needs from the students perspective all the way through to a prototype to practice the integration and shape it into something that works for you.

I believe that this module is a step on the right direction to more openness of education online, an extremely important movement that I hope will only become more popular as time goes on.

Please see my response below! 

For my third and final multimedia reflection, I have chosen to create a Powerpoint slideshow with narration and some neat transitions.  I decided to use this platform to do my reflection, because although I’ve known how to make Powerpoints, I have never narrated one of mine, nor rehearsed the timings so that it plays itself from start to finish.  I thought that this was a good platform to try and to learn how to use the more advanced functions, specifically the narrations, the animations and sounds applied to the images of the different modules, and then exporting the file to Youtube.  

Now that I have worked with and acquired these skills, I am confident that as a teacher, I could create recorded lessons for my students, perhaps if someone missed a class, wanted to review a specific concept, or even if I decided to try out a Flipped Classroom model.  This is a common way that teachers would record and upload a recorded lesson. I will say that this process took much, much longer than expected, because it obviously took time to reflect and synthesize my ideas about the Technologist module, then I had to put these ideas onto my slides in a visually pleasing way, by adding pictures, and some animations, and then after I had to go through and write a script for what I was going to narrate.  My script ended up being over 5 pages, and quite honestly, I wasn’t sure how long the presentation was going to be, but was relieved that it only was 10 minutes (although I do apologize for making it that long; I had put so much effort into writing the slides and the script that I had no clue how I was going to cut it). Anyways, I would highly recommend anybody wanting to record a lecture to do it with Powerpoint! I was impressed by how easy it was to record my voice, and if I messed up, I was able to clear the narrations for that slide, without having to start the whole process over (thank goodness!).  I did have to look up how I could narrate the slides, because I wasn’t able to quite figure it out on my own, so I found this Office Support website https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/record-a-slide-show-with-narration-and-slide-timings-0b9502c6-5f6c-40ae-b1e7-e47d8741161c which showed me that it’s just a simple button and it sets you up in a different window to begin recording and working through the slideshow.  It was very easy once I pressed the button, I just had to read and click on the screen.

One major challenge I would like to discuss is that after creating the presentation, and after saving it and trying to insert it directly into this post, I discovered that my file was wayyyyy too big to be linked here- the maximum is 10 MB, and mine is 36 MB.  So, I was actually horrified when I read that, because I have never come across this before, and I realized I would have to use the online repository for the first time!  I was patiently waiting for it to finish uploading, but uView said it may take awhile! And I really had no clue how long that might be. So after 18 hours and still a loading icon and the videos saying that they are initializing, I had to post my video on youtube! This also was quite difficult and I had to finally use Quicktime Player’s screen recording feature to get the audio onto the a video file (all of the other means of downloading the powerpoint to .mov and .mp4 wouldn’t capture my narrations).  So after I finally was able to screen record, the audio became a little fuzzy, so I hope you all don’t mind, and still are able to hear what I’m trying to get across.

-some of my frustrations are captured in this GIF of Patrick lol

I will not comment on the module here, because this is all contained in my slideshow and in my narrations!

So without further ado, here is my Powerpoint on Youtube!

https://youtu.be/6P9g2Iq-Fvo

And here is a link to the Ontario Extend Technologist Module https://extend.ecampusontario.ca/modules/ of which was the content of my slideshow.

Technologist: Module Checklist

Kaleigh Martin

#UWinDig #alwaysgiveyourselfplentyoftimeforuwindsorsrepository

As a student teachers we are always looking for new ways to benefit students learning. We study all of the theories of the philosophers in hopes that it will help us understand our profession more. We try to differentiate and integrate technology but the fact is in this technological era many of us have fallen victims to outdated curriculum and  misuse of technology in the classroom. I do not learn best from text books and I don’t believe that I could have made it through Chemistry in university without the aid of youtube. The thing is all of our classes tell us that students learn in different ways, so why the constant textbook work and lectures only catering to a few students needs?  Technology with proper use can help with all students learning and assist with many of the challenges they face. The Technologists Module addresses this need for proper use of technology in the classroom and goes through a step by step process that outlines how to select the proper technology. This five step process is a path to design thinking. The first step is Empathy. It is vital to empathise with the students, to see the challenge in front of them from their eyes. Many of us in university who have only been accustomed to academic classrooms and do not see the obstacles in some students lives. It is so easy to think that “this is easy, they should be getting this” so it becomes very important that we take the time to try to understand what they are going through. This leads to the second step, to Define the challenge the students are facing. Once you can visualise this problem you can begin to ideate; ask yourself how technology could solve this problem? What resources are available? The next step is to build the prototype; to choose the technology and try it out in the classroom. In this phase it is really important to reflect on how well it worked and ask the students what they thought. It can always be improved.  So in this phase it is important as teachers to realize that we are human and to accept critical feedback from students. If the attempt is a failure revaluate and try again. As teachers we want to model resilience and perseverance for our students. We can not ask them to be determined and self motivated if we are not. The last step is to connect this to the curriculum, to ensure that the learning goals are still met and that we have chosen an effective technology.

I chose to do a piktochart to illustrate this process. I have never used this platform before but will definitely encourage my students to use it in the future for projects. It was easy to use and creates professional looking charts. This pictochart emphasises the key points of design thinking including the five steps; empathise, define, ideate, prototype and connect. It also outlines this collaborative way of introducing something new in the classroom. Hope you enjoy!

After looking through the Technologist Module that is offered through Ontario Extend, I am now reflecting on my own time as a student in elementary and secondary school. I do not remember too many classes which involved technology integration, mainly because there was very little access to technology (~10 years ago) and I feel like the teachers back then were afraid of integrating technology into the classroom because they themselves have not been exposed enough or possibly trained to effectively use it in the classroom yet. The older I grew, I noticed that more teachers were using technology in more classes. I believe that since technology has become more prominent in everyday life, this has also transitioned into the school setting.

Knowing that there are ways to inform educators on ways that they can use and integrate technology into the classroom while taking into consideration the challenges and struggles that some students are faced with, will help educators learn to better use the different technology platforms in effective ways to minimize the learning curve for all. The Technologist Module was a very easy to follow and simple walk-through of interactive ways to inform teachers how technology can be used to help students achieve and overcome challenges. I really liked how the module was divided into sections as it made all of the information very organized and was not overwhelming to take in. Each of the sections go into detail about the design thinking process which was effective to learn with the six steps that were provided: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, connect and test. In each of these sections, there were step-by-step guidelines as to how this can be implemented to improve technology use in the classroom. For this reason, I enjoyed the layout of the module as it included some examples for each section and allowed me to think for myself how I can see this being implemented into a classroom of my own. For example, PhET is an online lab simulation website that can allow students to explore labs that may not be feasible to conduct in the classroom. This would reduce the amount of challenges within a class since if a student for example misses class, they are able to catch up with an online simulation of the lab to gain their experience. I believe that the use of this module in educators will shift the technology in the classroom gap that still lingers, as teachers will be able to see how there can be more differentiated learning within the class, while there are times where non-technological teaching styles do not allow this. I hope that as a future educator I can continue to become more aware of the different technologies available to be used within the classroom and broaden the spectrum of ways that students can succeed.

For this multimedia reflection. I decided to do a Twitter essay which was different than the platforms I used for the previous two reflections (sketchnote and Piktochart). I found that the sketchnote gave me the more freedom in terms of creativity because I was able to crate anything that came to mind, while the Piktochart did have some limits in terms of designing, though it was nice because it carried a technological aspect which was easy to use and had images and templates available for use. I believe that the Twitter essay combines both a traditional, yet technological method of communicating my thoughts. I was able to create my Twitter essay using short tweets, the same way I would write my thoughts out in a notebook with a pencil, however the Twitter essay incorporated the technology aspect by allowing GIFs and other images to be added. The Twitter essay could also be bound together in a Twitter thread so that those who were not able to see my tweets being posted live can retrace the “essay” with ease. The essay is also available for anyone to view, repost, and comment on, which allows for a many-to-many communication to take place. Including the hashtag #OntarioExtend and #UWinDig also allows users who are looking for specifically related tweets to search and find my tweets upon the return search. One thing that I struggled with was that Twitter has a character count which restricted what I wanted to say. Due to this, I was either forced to break my tweet into two parts or shorten my tweet to fit the character count.

Have a look at it! Hope you enjoy!!

The technologist module outlines a very strategic way for educators to present technology within the classroom in useful ways to encourage students to learn and present their work in unique ways! #OntarioExtend #UWinDig pic.twitter.com/WCwnINWZa2

— Ms. Tieu (@_Ms_Tieu) February 21, 2019

As I read through each of the parts to the technologist module from Ontario Extend I very quickly got overwhelmed by all of the information being thrown at me.  This whole project was very difficult for me because it was just soooo long and I felt like I had to click on all of the extra links which just added to the insanity.  At some point in this whole process I actually got lost in what I was supposed to be doing and I found myself deep in the internet after going through 5 or 6 hyperlinks in a row.  This seemed horribly ironic to me, wasn’t I supposed to be learning about how to use digital technology to aid in my learning, not hinder it?  After all of this hardship I had forgotten what I had read at the beginning so I had to start over.  Lets just say that it took me a very long time to read this and it was only 1 of the 6 modules!!!!!!! If there was ever a time that I needed to learn about technology and digital thinking, this is the last place I would go.  The explanations of important information was either vague or filled with the biggest words they could pull out of the dictionary.  Of everything that is on this website the most helpful thing I read or clicked on was the Great Tool List.  This is a list of useful tools that we can use as educators in the classroom, just be aware that some have very high learning curves, so don’t just throw one into your lesson without any practice.

Even though I have been bashing this website this whole time, simply because I don’t think it was a good way to portray this information, this topic of digital literacy is extremely important and should be talked about at least a little bit.  That’s why I decided to do a rant for this multi-media reflection.  I found the best way that I could express my knowledge on this subject was to just talk it out and share my thoughts out loud.  In the rant I did my best to stay away from the module and the disdain I have for it so I stuck to the ideas that it tried to portray like digital literacy and how prototypes are very useful things to have.  I hope you enjoy!

Link to my video

For this multimedia reflection, I discuss the technologist module created by eCampus Ontario as part of their promotion of digital technology in classrooms. The artifact I chose was a Twitter essay and I analyzed the module as it relates to differentiation and the universal design for learning (UDL) framework. I reason I chose Twitter as my platform is because I feel that I can spread the word regarding this resource much more effectively than other platforms. Also, I want to keep my thoughts more short and concise (which was how the module was organized) for this reflection and I feel that the 280 character limit of Twitter greatly helps with this.

The technologist module talks about digital literacies and the path of design thinking, which is categorized into five main steps: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and connect. This path follows a logical flow in the process of implementing a tool in the classroom. The teacher must first understand and identify the challenges that students face, brainstorm a tool and develop a prototype, and implement the tool and seek feedback for improvement. Most importantly, the tool must connect to the curriculum and learning outcomes. My overall impression of the module is positive. The content does not feel to be too overwhelming, and I am able to follow all their points clearly and proceed at my own pace. At critical points, there are accompanying visuals or videos to help clarify the concept. I like their definitions of digital literacy because I find that there are so many aspects to it, and the meaning can change from person to person. I also like their design thinking process because some teachers may rush to implement their tool into the classroom because its “cool” or “novel” that they do not stop to think whether it will be effective or not, essentially skipping over all the steps of design thinking (including feedback) and straight into the testing phase. In my opinion, a tool poorly implemented can hamper student learning much more than an effective lesson using traditional means. The empathize step really stood out to me because new tools should be implemented when students are challenged or struggling. Do they really need a new tool if everything is going well? As educators, I believe that knowing when to implement the tool is crucial. Another step that stood out to me is connect. Even though the module only spends two paragraphs talking about it, I find its message to be powerful. Does the tool enhance student learning to help them better achieve the learning outcomes? In the end, that’s what matters most in a classroom: technology is a tool to enhance student learning, not replace it.

The ultimate goal of the module to allow for differentiated instructions. For example, if students are not enthusiastic about writing an essay, perhaps assessing their analytical abilities through other means may provide better results. In a sense, it allows for students who may not be the best at writing to express themselves through other means. This promotes equity in classrooms because those students will not be unfairly evaluated due to their learning styles as opposed to their abilities. It also aligns with the UDL framework, which emphasizes engagement, representation, and action and expression in multiple means, because all students can now produce results based on their strengths as opposed to a few students. Ideally, the tool should accommodate expression using text, visual, audio, or other means. One example that I witnessed during my first practicum of a tool in action was Kahoot. As opposed to reviewing using traditional pen and paper or through oral means, teachers can quickly and effectively provide feedback on student learning and identify areas of improvements. In addition, students can also quickly produce Kahoot quizzes to engage the rest of the class. If certain students have issues with Kahoot, then they can also orally say the answer or write it down. As a final point, technology can also allow for many-to-many communication that is not possible before. This greatly improves the efficiency of information transfer. Of course, this also comes with the risk of cyber dangers, which I touched upon in my previous multimedia reflection. Therefore, teachers should be very familiar with the tool and digital safety (part of digital literacy) before its implementation.

Overall, Twitter was a user-friendly platform to use. It does produce a bit of an uncomfortable feeling knowing that my essay is posted on one of the most popular social media sites for all of public to see. Looking back on my experiences in this course, I must say that I am definitely more digitally literate and am more comfortable working with technology. For example, at the beginning of the course, I would never have dreamed of using Twitter as a platform for my multimedia reflections. In addition, I am also starting to think more critically about digital technology and find myself looking for the finer prints of a platform at times. One thing that has been consistent throughout is the strange feeling of not-yetness that I discussed in my first multimedia reflection. I am never really sure how things will turn out when I think about implementing a tool in the classroom. There is always this feeling of unfamiliarity at time, when I feel like I don’t understand technology at all or how to best use it to its full potential. I believe this is due to the ever changing state of our digital environment, where every educator must learn to quickly adapt or be left behind by their students and society. As a future educator, I must be prepared to take on this challenge to effectively integrate technology into lessons and provide high quality lessons with each class.

-Michael Wang